4 Goblin Dreams Most county fairs have horse races in addition to livestock shows, carnivals and kootch dancers, so most fairgrounds have locker rooms and showers under their grandstands, for the convenience of jockeys and sulky drivers. this place was no exception. The door was locked, but that could not stop me. I was no longer just an Oregon farm boy, no Matter how devoutly I might have wished to regain that lost innocence; I was, instead, a young man with knowledge of the road. I carried a thin, stiff strip of plastic in my wallet, and I used it now to open the flimsy lock in less than a minute. I went inside, switched on the lights, and relocked the door behind me. Green metal toilet stalls were lined up on the left, chipped sinks and age-yellowed mirrors on the 'right, showers at the far end. A double row of scratched and dented lockers, back to back, ran through the center of the big room, with scarred benches in front of them. Bare cement floor. Concrete block walls. Exposed fluorescent ceiling lights. Vaguely foul odors sweat, urine, stale liniment, fungus-and a pungent, overriding scent of pine disinfectant gave the air an unsavory richness that made me grimace but was not quite-though almost disgusting enough to trigger the gag reflex. Not a swell place. Not a place you were likely to meet any of the Kennedys, for instance, or Cary Grant. But there were no windows here, which meant I could safely leave the lights on, and it was much cooler-though no less humid-than the dusty fair grounds outside. First thing, I rinsed the metallic taste of blood out of my mouth and brushed my teeth. In the cloudy mirror above the sink, my eyes were so wild and haunted that I quickly looked away from them. My T-shirt was torn. Both my shirt and jeans were bloody After I showered, washing the stink of the goblin out of my hair, and dried off with a bunch of paper towels, I dressed in another T-shirt and a pair of ' jeans that I took out of my backpack. At one of the sinks, I washed some of the blood out of the ruined T-shirt, soaked the jeans as well, wrung them, then buried them in a nearly full trash barrel by the.door, unwilling to risk being caught with incriminating, bloodstained clothing in my pack. My remaining wardrobe consisted entirely of the new jeans I had put on, the T-shirt I wore, one other T-shirt, three pair of briefs, socks, and a thin corduroy ' jacket. You travel light when you're wanted for murder. The only heavy things you carry are memories, fear, and loneliness. I decided the safest place to spend the last hour of the night was there in the locker room beneath the grandstand. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor, in front of the door, and stretched out on it. No one could get inside without alerting me the moment he began to work the lock, and my body would serve as a doorstop to keep intruders out. I left the lights on. I was not afraid of the dark. I simply preferred not to subject myself to it. Closing my eyes, I thought of Oregon. . . . I was homesick for the farm, for the verdant meadows where I had played as a child, in the shadow of the mighty Siskiyou Mountains, which made the mountains of the East seem ancient, worn, and tarnished. In memories that now unfolded like incredibly elaborate origami sculptures, I saw the rising ramparts of the Siskiyous, forested with her on her of enormous Sitka spruce, with scattered Brewer's spruce (the most beautiful of all the conifers), Lawson cypress, Douglas fir, tangerine-scented white fir that was rivaled in aromatic influence only by the tufted incense cedar, dogwood with no scent but with brilliant leaves, big-leaf maple, pendulous western maple, neat ranks of dark-green Sadler oak, and even in the faded light of memory that scene took my breath away. My cousin Kerry Harkenfield, Uncle Denton's stepson, met a particularly ugly death midst all that beauty. He was murdered. He had been My favorite cousin and best friend. Even months after his death, even by the time I found myself in the Sombra Brothers carnival, I still felt the loss of him. Acutely. Opening my eyes, staring up at the water-stained and dustfilmed acoustic tiles of the locker-room ceiling, I forced myself to block out the chilling recollection of Kerry's shattered body. There were better memories of Oregon. . . . In the Yard in front of our house, there had been a large Brewer's spruce, usually called a weeping spruce, arching branches draped with elegant shawls of green-black lace. In summer, the shiny foliage was a display field for sunlight in much the same way that a jeweler's velvet pad shows gems to their best advantage; the boughs were often draped with insubstantial but dazzling chains and linked beads and flashing necklaces and shimmering jeweled arcs composed purely of sunshine. In winter, snow encrusted the weeping spruce, conforming to its peculiar shape; if the day was bright, the tree seemed like a Christmas celebrant-but if the day was gray, the tree was a mourner in a graveyard, the very embodiment of misery and gloom. That spruce had been in its mourning clothes the day I killed my Uncle Denton. I had an ax. He had only his bare hands. Nevertheless, disposing of him was not easy. Another bad memory. I shifted, closed my eyes again. If there was any hope of getting to sleep, I would have to think only of the good times, of Mom and Dad and my sisters. I was born in the white farmhouse that stood behind the Brewer's spruce, a much-wanted boy and much-loved child, first and only son of.Cynthia and Kurt Stanfeuss. My two sisters had just enough tomboy in them to make good playmates for an only brother, just enough feminine grace and sensibility to instill in me some manners, sophistication, and refinement that I might not otherwise have acquired in the rustic world of the rural Siskiyou valleys. Sarah Louise, blond and fair like our father, was two years older than I. From a young age she could draw and paint with such skill that you would have thought She had been a famous artist in a prior life, and it was her dream to earn her living with brushes and palette. She had a special empathy with animals. She could handle any horse well and effortlessly, charm a pouting cat, calm a chicken yard full of nervous hens just by walking among them, and quickly coax a sheepish grin and a wag of the tail from even the meanest dog. Jennifer Ruth, brunette and almond-skinned like our mother, was three years older than I. She was a voracious reader of fantasies and adventure stories, as was Sarah, but Jenny had no artistic talent to speak of, although she made an art form of her way with figures. Her affinity for numbers, for all forms and disciplines of mathematics, was a constant astonishment to everyone else in the Stanfeuss household, for the rest of us, given a choice between adding a long column of sums and putting a collar on a porcupine, would have opted for the porcupine every time. Jenny also had a photographic memory. She could quote word-for-word from books she had read years ago, and both Sarah and I were deeply envious of the ease with which Jenny compiled report card after report card of straight-a grades. Biological magic and the rarest serendipity were evident in the blending of my mother and father's genes, for none of their children escaped the burden of extraordinary talent. Not that it was difficult to understand how they could have produced us. They were gifted, too, in their own ways. My father was a musical genius, and I use the word genius in its original meaning, not as an indication of IQ but to express the fact that he had an exceptional natural capacity, in this case a capacity for music. There was no instrument that he could not play well within a day of picking it up, and within a week he could perform the most complex and demanding numbers with a facility that others labored years to acquire. A piano stood in our parlor, and Dad would often play, from memory, tunes he had heard only that morning, on the radio, while driving the pickup into town. For a few months after he was killed, all the music went out of our house, both literally and figuratively. I was fifteen when my father died, and at the time I believed his death was an accident, which was what everyone else thought too. Most of them still think so. Now I know that Uncle Denton killed him. But I had killed Denton, so why couldn 't I sleep? Revenge had been taken, rough justice done, so why couldn't I find at least an hour or two of peace? Why was each night an ordeal? I could sleep only when insomnia led to a state of exhaustion so complete that the choice was reduced to sleep or madness. I tossed. I turned. I thought of my mother, who was as special as my father had been. Mom had a way with green, growing things; plants thrived for her as animals obeyed her younger daughter, the way mathematical problems resolved themselves for her elder daughter. One quick look at any plant, a brief touc
h of leaf or stem, and Mom knew precisely what nutrients or special care her green friend required. Her vegetable garden always produced the biggest and best-tasting tomatoes anyone had ever eaten,.the juiciest corn, the sweetest onions. Mom was a healer too. Oh, not a faith healer, mind you, not a quack of any kind; she made no claim of psychic power, and she did not heal by a laying-on of hands. She was an herbalist, mixing her own poultices, salves, and ointments, blending delicious medicinal teas. No one in the Stanfeuss family ever contracted a bad cold, never anything worse than one-day sniffles. We suffered neither cold sores, influenza, bronchitis, pinkeye, nor the other ills that children bring home from school and pass on to their parents. Neighbors and relatives often came by for my mother's herbal concoctions, and though she was frequently offered money, she never accepted a penny in return; she felt that it would be blasphemous to receive any compensation for her gift other than the joy of employing it for the benefit of her family and others. And, of course, I am also gifted, though my special abilities are far different from the more rational talents of my siblings and parents. In me the genetic serendipity of Cynthia and Kurt Stanfeuss was not mere magic but almost sorcery. According to my Grandmother Stanfeuss, who possesses a treasure of arcane folk wisdom, I have Twilight Eyes. They are the very color of twilight, an odd shade that is more purple than blue, with a particular clarity and a trick of refracting light in such a way that they appear slightly luminous and strange and (I am told) unusually beautiful. Grandma says that not even one in half a million people have such eyes, and I must admit I have never seen others like mine. Upon first seeing me, blanket-wrapped in my mother's arms, Grandma told my folks that Twilight Eyes in a newborn baby were a harbinger of psychic ability; if they did not change color by the child's second birthday (as mine did not), then according to Grandma-folk tales have it that the psychic ability will be unusually strong and manifested in a variety of ways. Grandma was right. And as I thought of Grandma's softly seamed and gentle face, as I pictured her own warm and loving eyes (sea-green), I found not peace but at least a state of truce. Sleep stole to me in the armistice like an army nurse bringing anesthetics across a temporarily silenced battleground. My dreams were of goblins. They frequently are. in the last dream of several, my Uncle Denton screamed at me as I wielded the ax: No! I'm not a goblin! I'm just like you, Carl. What are you talking about? Are you mad? There aren't goblins. No such thing. You're crazy, Carl. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Insane! You're insane! Insane! In real life he had not screamed, had not denied my accusations. In real life our battle had been grim and bitterly waged. But three hours after sleep claimed me, I woke with Denton's voice still echoing at me from out of the dream. "Insane! You're insane, Carl! Oh, my God, you're insane! I was shaking, sweat-drenched, disoriented, and feverish with doubt. Gasping, whimpering, I stumbled to the nearest sink, turned on the cold water, and splashed my face. The lingering images of the dream receded, faded, vanished. Reluctantly I raised my head and looked in the mirror. Sometimes I have difficulty confronting the reflection of my own strange eyes because I am afraid I will see madness in them. This was one of those times. I could not rule out the possibility, however remote, that the goblins were nothing more than phantoms of my tortured imagination. God knows,.I wanted to rule it out, to be unshaken in my convictions, but the possibility of delusion and insanity remained, periodically draining me of will and purpose as surely as a leech steals vital blood. Now I stared into my own anguished eyes, and they were so unusual that the reflection of them was not flat and twodimensional, as it would have been with any other man's eyes; the mirror image seemed to have as much depth and reality and power as the real eyes. I probed my own gaze honestly and relentlessly, but I could see no trace of lunacy. I told myself that my ability to see through the goblins' disguises was as unquestionable as my other psychic talents. I knew my other powers were real and reliable, for numerous people had benefited from my clairvoyance and had been astonished by it. My Grandmother Stanfeuss called me "the little seer," because I could sometimes see the future and sometimes see moments in other people's pasts. And, damn it, I could see goblins, too, and the fact that I was the only one who saw them was no reason to distrust my vision. But doubt remained. "Someday," I said to my somber reflection in the yellowed mirror, "that doubt will surface at the wrong moment. It'll overwhelm you when you're fighting for your life with a goblin. Then it will be the death of you."
5 Fretiks Three hours of sleep, a few minutes to wash, a few minutes more to roll up my sleeping bag and harness myself to the backpack, made it nine-thirty by the time I opened the lockerroom door and went outside. The day was hot and cloudless. The air was not as moist as it had been last night. A refreshing breeze made me feel rested and clean, and it blew the doubts into deeper reaches of my mind, much the same way it gathered up litter and old leaves, packing them into corners formed by the fairground buildings and shrubbery, not disposing of the trash altogether but at least keeping it out from underfoot. I was glad to be alive. I returned to the midway and was surprised by what I found. My last impression of the carnival, before I deserted it last night, was one of looming danger, bleakness, and oppression, but in daylight the place seemed harmless, even cheerful. The hundreds of pennants, all colorless in the moonbleached hours of the night, were now crimson like Christmas bows, yellow as marigolds, emerald-green, white, electrichlue, and orange-orange; they rippled-fluttered-snapped in the wind. The amusement rides gleamed and sparkled so brightly in the sharp August sun that even from a short distance they appeared not merely newer and fancier than they were but seemed to be plated with silver and finest gold, like elf-made machines in a fairy tale. At nine-thirty the fairground gates had not yet opened to the public. Only a few carnies had ventured back to the midway. On the concourse two men were picking up litter with spike-tipped poles and stuffing it into large bags slung from their shoulders. We said: "Hi"and " 'lo" to one another. A burly man with dark hair and a handlebar mustache was standing on the barker's platform at the fun house, five feet above the ground, his hands on his hips, staring back and up at the giant clown's face that formed the entire front of the attraction. He must have seen me from the corner of his eye, for he turned and looked down and asked my opinion as to whether the clown's nose needed painting. I said, "Well, it looks fine to me. Looks like it was painted just last week. A nice.bright red." And he said, "Was painted just last week. Used to be yellow, been yellow fourteen years, and then a month ago I got myself married for the first time, and my wife, Giselle, says a clown's nose should be red, and since I'm damned sweet on Giselle, I decided to paint it, see, which I did, but now I'll W-God-croaked if I don't think it was a mistake, because when it was yellow, it was a nose with character, you know, and now it's just like every clown's nose you've ever seen in your whole God-blasted life, and what's the good of that?" He did not seem to want an answer, for he jumped off the platform and, grumbling, stalked around the side of the fun house, out of sight. I ambled along the concourse until I came to the Whip, where a wiry little man was repairing the generator. His hair was that shade of orange that isn't auburn and isn't red but which everyone calls red, anyway, and his freckles were so numerous and bright that they appeared unreal, as if they had been carefully painted on his cheeks and nose. I told him I was Slim MacKenzie, and he didn't tell me who he was. I sensed that clannish, secretive mind-set of a lifelong carny, so I talked for a bit about the gillies and ragbags I'd worked in the Midwest, all the way through Ohio, while he continued to tinker with the generator and remained mute. At last I must have convinced him that I was on the level, for he wiped his greasy hands on a rag, told me his name was Rudy Morton but everyone called him Red, nodded at me, and said, "You lookin' for work?" I said that I was, and he said, "Jelly Jordan does all the hiring. He's our patch, and he's Arturo Sombra's right-hand man. You'll probably find him at the headquarters compound." He told me where that was, out near the front of the midway, and I thanked him, and I know he watched for some time as I walked a
way, although I didn't once glance back at him. I cut across the sunny midway rather than walk around the entire concourse, and the next carny I met was a big man coming toward me with his head down, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, altogether too defeated-looking for a day as golden as this one. He must have been six-four, with massive shoulders and huge arms, two hundred and seventy pounds of muscle, a striking figure even when he slouched. His head was held so low between those Herculean shoulders that I could see nothing of his face, and I knew he did not see me. He walked between the hulking equipment, stepping on cables, plowing through accumulations of litter, self-absorbed. I was afraid that I would startle him, so before I was atop him, I called out, "Lovely morning, isn't it?" He took two more steps, as if he required that long to register that my greeting was aimed at him. We were only eight feet apart when he looked up at me, revealing a face that froze my marrow. Goblin! I thought. I almost reached for the knife within my boot. Oh, Jesus, God, no, another Goblin! "You said something?" he asked. When the wave of shock had passed through me, I saw that he was not a goblin, after all-or at least not a goblin like the others. He had a nightmare face, but there was nothing of pig or dog in it. No fleshy snout, no fangs, no flickering, serpentine tongue. He was human but a freak, his skull so malformed that it proved God had strange, macabre moments. In fact . . . Imagine yourself a divine sculptor, working in the medium of flesh-blood-bone, with a bad hangover and a despicable sense of humor. Now start sculpting with a huge brutal jaw that does not recede as it.approaches your creation's ears (the way the jawline does in normal faces) but terminates abruptly in ugly knotted lumps of bone reminiscent of the neck bolts featured in the movie version of the Frankenstein monster. Now, just above those unsightly lumps, give your hapless creation a pair of ears like wads of crumpled cabbage leaves. A mouth inspired by the scoop of a steam shovel. Throw in some big square teeth, too many of them, crowding one another and overlapping at several points, and all a permanent shade of yellow so gross that your creation will be ashamed to open his mouth in polite company. Sound like enough cruelty to vent any godly anger that you may have been feeling? Wrong. You are apparently in a truly cosmic rage, a deific lather sufficient to make the universe quiver from one end to the other, for you also sculpt a forehead thick enough to act as armor plating, build it up until it overhangs the eyes and transforms the underlying sockets into caves. Now, in a fever of malignant creation, you carve a hole in that forehead, above the right eye but closer to the temple than the socket below, and plug in a third eye that is without iris or pupil, just an oval of undifferentiated burnt-orange tissue. That done, you add two final touches that are unquestionably the mark of malevolent genius: You pop a noble and perfectly made nose into the center of that grisly mug, to taunt your creation with ideas of what might have been; within the two lower sockets you imbed a pair of clear, brown, warm, intelligent, beautiful, normal eyes, exquisitely expressive, so that anyone who sees them must quickly look away or weep uncontrollably with pity for the sensitive soul trapped within this hulk. Are you still with me? You probably don't want to play God any more. What gets into Him sometimes? Don't you wonder? If a creation like this can result merely from His moodiness or pique, just imagine what state of mind He must have been in when He was seriously upset, when He made Hell and cast the rebel angels into it. This prank of God spoke again, and his voice was soft and kind: "I'm sorry. Did you say something? I was woolgathering. "Urn . . . uh . . . I said . . . lovely morning. "Yes. I guess it is. You're new, aren't you?" "Uh . . . I'm Carl . . . Slim. "Carl Slim?" "No . . . uh ... Slim MacKenzie," I said, head tilted back to stare up at him. "Joel Tuck," he said. I could not adjust to the rich timbre and soft tone of his voice. From the look of him, I expected a broken-glass, shattered-rock voice full of cold hostility. He offered a hand. I shook it. It was like anybody else's hand, though bigger. "I own the ten-in-one," he said. "Ah," I said, trying not to look at the blank orange eye but staring, anyway. A ten-in-one was a sideshow, usually a freak show, with at least ten attractions-or freaks-under the same tent. "Not just the owner," Joel Tuck said. "I'm the star attraction too." "No doubt," I said. He burst out laughing, and I flushed with embarrassment, but he would not permit me to sputter through an apology. He shook his deformed head and put one massive hand on my shoulder and, grinning, assured me that no offense had been taken.."In fact," he said, surprisingly garrulous, "it's refreshing to meet a carny for the Just time and have him show his shock. You know, most of the marks who pay to get in the ten-in-one, they point and gasp and talk about me right in front of my face. Very few of them have the wit or grace to leave the sideshow a better person, with gratitude for their own good fortune. A bunch of crass, small-minded . . . well, you know what marks are like. But carnies . . . sometimes, in their own way, they can be just as bad." I nodded, as if I knew what he was talking about. I had managed to look away from his third eye, but now I couldn't seem to take my eyes off his steam-shovel mouth. It clapped open and shut, and his knotted jaws creaked and bulged, and I thought of Disneyland. The year before my father died, he took us down to California, to Disneyland, which was new then, but even in those days they had what they called the audio-animatronic robots, with lifelike faces and movements, convincing in every detail except for their mouths, which clapped open and shut with none of the intricate and subtle movements of real mouths. Joel Tuck seemed like a macabre audio-animatronic robot that the Disneyland guys had built as a joke, intending to put a good scare into Uncle Wait. God pity me for having been so insensitive, but I expected that grotesque man to be equally grotesque in thought and word. Instead he said, "Carnies are all so painfully aware of their tradition of tolerance and brotherhood. Sometimes their diplomacy is irritating. But you! Ah, now, you have struck just the right note. Not morbidly curious or smugly superior or full of effusive declarations of false pity like the marks. Not unstintingly diplomatic, not given to studied indifference like most carnies. Understandably shocked, not ashamed of your instinctive reactions, a boy who knows his manners but still has a wholesome curiosity and a welcome frankness-that's you, Slim MacKenzie, and I'm pleased to make your acquaintance. "Likewise. His generosity in analyzing my reactions and motivations made me blush even brighter, but he pretended not to notice. He said, "Well, I must be going. There's an eleven o'clock show call, and I've got to get the ten-in-one ready to open. Besides, when there are marks on the midway, I don't go outside the tent with my face uncovered. Wouldn't be right if someone who didn't want to see this mug got exposed to it. Besides, I don't believe in giving the bastards a free show!" "See you later, then," I said, my gaze drifting back to his third eye, which blinked once, almost as if winking at me. He took two steps, his size fourteen shoes raising small clouds of white dust from the August-parched earth. Then he turned to me again, hesitated, and at last said, "What do you want from the carnival, Slim MacKenzie?" "What ... you mean ... from this carnival in particular?" "From the life in general." "Well . . . a place to sleep." His jaws bunched and shifted. "You'll got that." "Three square meals a day." "that too." "Pocket money." "You'll do better than that. You're young, bright, quick. I can see all that. You'll do well. What else?" "You mean . . . what else do I want?" "Yes. What else?".I sighed. "Anonymity." "Ah." His expression might have been a conspiratorial smile or a grimace; it was not always easy to tell what that twisted face meant to convey. His mouth was open slightly, his teeth like the stained and weathered pickets of an ancient fence, as he contemplated me and what I'd said, as if he might inquire further or offer advice, but he was too good a carny to pry. He merely said "Ah" again. "Sanctuary," I said, almost wishing he would pry, suddenly struck by the crazy urge to take him into my confidence and tell him about the goblins, Uncle Denton. For months, since the first time I had killed a goblin, I had required unfaltering strength of purpose and character in order to survive, and in that time and through all my travels I had not encountered anyone who seemed to have been tempered by a fire as hot as that which had tempered m
e. Now, in Joel Tuck, I sensed that I had found a man whose suffering, anguish, and loneliness had been far greater than mine, endured far longer; he was a man who had accepted the unacceptable with uncommon strength and grace. Here was someone who might understand what it was like to live always in a nightmare, without a moment's respite. In spite of his monstrous face, there was something fatherly about him, and I had the extraordinary urge to lean on him and let the tears flow at last, at long last, and tell him about the demonic creatures that stalked the earth unseen. But self-control was my most precious possession, and suspicion was the asset that had proven most valuable for survival, and I could not easily put aside either attitude. I merely repeated: "Sanctuary." "Sanctuary," he said. "I believe you'll find that too. I surely hope you do because . . . I think you need it, Slim MacKenzie. I think you need it desperately." That comment was so out of character with the rest of our brief conversation that it jolted me. We stared at each other for a moment. This time I looked not at the blind, orange orb in his forehead but at his other eyes. In them I thought I saw compassion. Psychically I sensed in him a reaching-out, a warmth. However, I also perceived a secretiveness that was not apparent in his manner, a discomfiting indication that he was more than he seemed to be-that he was, in some vague way, perhaps even dangerous. A shudder of dread passed through me, but I didn't know if I should be afraid of him or of something that would happen to him. The moment broke like a fragile thread-abruptly but with no great drama. "See you around," he said. "Yeah," I said, my mouth so dry and my throat so constricted that I couldn't have said more. He turned and walked away. I watched him until he was out of sight-the same way that the mechanic, Red Morton, had watched me when I walked away from the Whip. Again I thought of leaving the carnival and finding a place where the omens and portents were less disturbing. But I was down to my last few pennies, and I was tired of being on the road alone, and I needed to belong somewhere-and I was enough of a seer to know that you can't walk away from Destiny no matter how ardently you might wish to do so. Besides, the Sombra Brothers Carnival was obviously a good and companionable place for a freak to settle down. Joel Tuck and me. Freaks. 6.Daughter of the Sun The carnival headquarters was lodged in three brightly painted trailers-each white with a brilliant rainbow design sweeping across it. "They were arranged in an incomplete square, the front side missing. A portable picket fence surrounded the enclosure. Mr. Timothy "Jelly" Jordan had an office in the long trailer on the left, which also housed the accountant and the woman who dispensed rolls of tickets every morning. I waited for half an hour in the plain, linoleum-floored room where the bald accountant, Mr. Dooley, was poring through piles of papers. As he worked, he nibbled steadily from a dish of radishes and pepperoncinis and black olives, and his spicy breath permeated the room, though none of the people who came in seemed bothered by it-or even aware of it. I half expected one of the visitors to rush in with word that a carny was missing or even that one had been found dead in the vicinity of the Dodgem Car pavilion, and then they would all look at me because I was an outsider, the newcomer, a likely suspect, and they would see guilt in my face, and . . . But no alarm was raised. At last I was told that Mr. Jordan was ready to see me, and when I entered his office at the back of the trailer, I saw at once why he had been given his nickname. He was a good two or @ inches shy of six feet, six or seven inches shorter than Joel Tuck, but he weighed about as much as Tuck, at least two hundred and seventy pounds. He had a face like a pudding, a round nose that might have been a pale plum, and a chin as shapeless as a dumpling. When I walked through his door, a toy car was running in circles on the top of his desk. It was a little convertible with four tiny clowns sitting in it, and as it moved, the clowns took turns popping up and then sitting down again. Picking up another toy, he said, "Look at this one. Just got it yesterday. It's absolutely great. Absolutely." He put it down, and I saw that it was a metal dog with jointed legs that propelled it across the desk in a series of slow somersaults. He watched it, eyes shining with delight. Glancing around the room, I saw toys everywhere. One wall was fitted with bookshelves that held no books, just a colorful collection of miniature windup cars, trucks, figurines, and a tiny windmill that probably boasted moving blades. In one corner two marionettes hung from a peg to prevent the control strings from tangling, and in another corner a ventriloquist's dummy was perched attentively on a stool. I looked back at the desk in time to see the dog complete one last, even slower somersault. Then, with the power provided by the final unwinding length of spring, it sat up on its haunches and raised its forepaws, as if begging for approval of its stunts. Jelly Jordan looked at me, grinning broadly. "Ain't that just absolutely the absolute?" I liked him immediately. "Terrific," I said. "So you want to join up with Sombra Brothers, do you?" he asked, leaning back in his chair as soon as I had settled in another. "Yes, sir. "I don't suppose you're a concessionaire with your own shop, looking to pay a privilege for a spot on the midway.."No, sir. I'm only seventeen." "Oh, don't plead youth with me! I've known concessionaires that young. Knew a kid who started at fifteen as a weight-guesser, had a real attractive spiel, charmed the marks and did real well, added a couple of other small games to her little empire, then managed to buy herself a duck shoot by the time she was your age, and duck shoots don't come cheap. Thirty-five thousand bucks, in fact." "Well, I guess by comparison to her I'm already a loser in life. " Jelly Jordan grinned. He had a nice grin. "Then you'll be wanting to be an employee of the Sombra Brothers." "Yes, sir. Or if one of the concessionaires is looking for a helper of any kind . . . " "I suppose you ain't nothing but a roughie, dime-a-dozen muscle, can't do more than put up the Dive Bomber and the Ferris wheel and load trucks and hump equipment around on your back. Is that right? Nothing more to offer than your sweat?" I leaned forward in my chair. "I can operate any hankypank there ever was, any winner-every-time game. I can run a mouse-in-the-hole as slick as anyone. I can barker a little, hell, better than two-thirds of the guys I've heard chatting up the tip in the gillies and ragbags where I've worked, though I don't claim to be as good as the born pitchmen who probably wind up in the best outfits, like yours. I'm a real good Bozo for a pitch-and-dunk because I don't mind getting wet, and because the insults I throw at the marks aren't nasty but funny, and they always react to funny better. I can do lots of stuff . " "Well, well," Jelly Jordan said, "seems like the gods are smiling on the Sombra Brothers today, damned if they ain't, sending us such a splendid young jack-of-all-trades. Absolutely splendid. Absolute." "Kid me all you want, Mr. Jordan, but please find something for me. I swear I won't disappoint you." He stood up and stretched, and his belly jiggled. "Well, Slim, I think I'll tell Rya Raines about you. She's a concessionaire. She needs someone to run the high-striker for her. Ever done that?" 'Sure. "Okay. If she likes you, and if you can get along with her, you're all set. If you can't get along with her, come back and see me, and I'll set you up with someone else or put you on the Sombra Brothers payroll." I got up, too. "This Mrs. Raines-" "Miss.""Since you brought it up . . . is she difficult to get along with or something?" He smiled. "You'll see. Now, as for sleeping arrangements, I figure you ain't come rolling in here with your own trailer any more than your own concession, so you'll want to bunk down in one of the show's dormitory trailers. I'll find out who needs another roommate, and you can pay the first week's rent to Cash Dooley, the accountant you met in the other room." I fidgeted. "Uh, well, I left a backpack and sleeping bag out there, and I really prefer bunking down under the stars. Healthier. "Don't allow that here," he said. "If we did, we'd have a bunch of roughies sleeping on the ground, drinking out in the open, copulating with everything from women to stray cats, which would make us look like some absolute ragbag outfit, which we sure ain't. We're a class act all the way." "Oh." He cocked his head and squinted at me. "Broke?" "Well . . ."."Can't pay rent?" I shrugged. "We'll carry you for two weeks," he said. "After that you pay like everybody else." "Gee, thanks, Mr. Jordan." "Call me Jelly now that you're one of us." "Thanks, Jell
y, but I'll let you carry me for just one week. After that I'll be on my feet. Now, should I go straight on up to the high-striker from here? I know where it is, and I know you have an eleven o'clock show call today, which means about ten minutes until the gates open." He was still squinting at me. The fat bunched around his eyes, and his plum nose wrinkled up as if it might turn into a prune. He said, "You have breakfast yet?" "No, sir. Wasn't hungry." "It's almost lunchtime." "Still not hungry. "I'm always hungry," he said. "You have dinner last night?" "Me?" "You." "Sure." He frowned skeptically, dug in his pocket, pulled out a pair of one-dollar bills, and came around the desk with his hand held toward me. "Oh, no, Mr. Jordan-" "Jelly-" "-Jelly. I couldn't accept it." "Just a loan," he said, taking my hand and stuffing the money in it. "You'll pay me back. That's an absolute fact." "But I'm not that broke. I have some money." "How much?" "Well . . . ten bucks. He grinned again. "Show me." Huh?" "Liar. How much, really?" I looked down at my feet. "Really, now? Tell the truth," he said warningly. "Well . . . ummm . . . twelve cents." "Oh, yes, I see. You're an absolute Rockefeller. Good heavens, I am definitely mortified to think I tried to loan you money. A wealthy man at seventeen, clearly an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune!" He gave me two more bucks. "Now you listen to me, Mr. Filthy Rich Playboy, you go to Sam Trizer's grab-joint by the merry-go-round. It's one of the best on the lot, and he opens early to serve carnies. Get yourself a good lunch and then go see Rya Raines at her high-striker." I nodded, embarrassed by my poverty because a Stanfeuss never relied on anyone but another Stanfeuss. Nevertheless, humbled and self-reproachful, I was also grateful for the fat man's good-humored charity. When I reached the door and opened it, he said, "Wait a minute." I looked back and saw that he was staring at me in a different way than before. He had been sizing me up to determine my character, my abilities, and my sense of responsibility, but now he was looking at me the way a handicapper might examine a horse on which he intended to place a bet. "You're a strong youngster," he said. "Good biceps. Good shoulders. You move well too. You look like you could take care of yourself in a tight situation." As some answer seemed required, I said, "Well . . . I have, yeah." I wondered what he would say if I told him that I had killed four goblins so far-four pig-faced, dog-fanged, serpent-tongued things with.murderous red eyes and claws like rapiers. He regarded me in silence for a moment, then at last said, "Listen, if you can get along with Rya, that's who you'll work for. But tomorrow I'd like you to do a special job for me. There probably won't be any tough stuff, but the potential's there. Worse comes to worst, you might have to duke it out with someone. But I suspect you'll just have to stand around and look intimidating." "Whatever you want," I said. "You ain't going to ask what the job,is?" "You can explain it tomorrow." "You don't want a chance to turn it down?" "Nope." "There're some risks involved." I held up the four dollars he had given me. "You've bought yourself a risk taker." "You come cheap." "It wasn't the four bucks that bought me, Jelly. It was the kindness. " He was uncomfortable with the compliment. "Get the hell out of here, grab your lunch, and start earning your keep. We don't like deadbeats on the lot." Feeling better than I had felt in months, I went out to the front office, and Cash Dooley said I could leave my gear with him until they found trailer space for me, and then I went to Sam Trizer's grab-joint for a bite of lunch. They call these places "grab-joints" or "grab-stands" because there's no place to sit, so you just have to grab your food and eat on the fly. I had two perfect chili dogs, French fries, a vanilla shake, and then headed up the midway. As county fairs go, this was better than average, almost large, but not nearly as big as the important fairs in places like Milwaukee, St. Paul, Topeka, Pittsburgh, and Little Rock, where paid admissions could top a quarter of a million on a good day. Nonetheless, Thursday was getting close to the weekend. And it was summer when -the kids were out of school, and a lot of people were on vacation. Besides, in rural Pennsylvania the fair was as much excitement as there ever was-people came from fifty or sixty miles around-so even though the gates had just opened, a thousand marks had come onto the midway already. All the hartky-panks and other games were ready for business, their operators beginning to pitch the passing tip, and many of the rides were running. The scent of popcorn was in the air, and diesel fuel, and cookhouse grease. The gaudy fantasy was just cranking up its engine, but in a few hours it would be running at full-tilt-a thousand exotic sounds, an all-encompassing blaze of color and motion that would eventually seem to expand until it had become the universe, until it was impossible to believe that anything existed beyond the carnival grounds. I passed the Dodgem Cars, half expecting to see police and a crowd of horrified onlookers, but the ticket booth was open, and the cars were in operation, and the marks were screaming but only at one another as they crashed their rubber-bumpered vehicles together. If anyone had noticed the fresh stains on the pavilion floor, he hadn't realized they were blood. I wondered where my unknown helper had taken the corpse, wondered when he would finally come forward and make himself known to me. And when he did reveal himself, what would he want from me for his continued silence? The high-striker was two-thirds of the way along the first concourse, on the outside edge of the midway, tucked between a balloon game and a fortune-teller's small, striped tent. It was a simple device that.consisted of an eighteen-inch square striking pad mounted on springs and designed to measure impact, a backdrop shaped like a twenty-foot-high thermometer, and a bell at the top of the thermometer. Guys who wanted to impress their dates had only to pay fifty cents, take the sledgehammer provided by the operator, swing it hard, and land a blow on the striking pad. This would drive a small wooden block up the thermometer, which was divided into five sections: GRANDMA, GRANDPA, GOOD BOY, TOUGH GUY, and HE-MAN. If you were enough of a he-man to drive the block all the way to the top and ring the bell, you not only impressed your girl and had a better chance of getting in her pants before the night was over, but you also won a cheap stuffed animal. Beside this high-striker stood a rack of furry teddy bears that didn't look half as cheap as the usual prizes in a game of this sort, and on a stool beside the teddy bears sat the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was wearing brown corduroy jeans and a brown-and-red-checkered blouse, and I vaguely noticed that her body was lean and excitingly proportioned, but truthfully I did not pay much attention to the way she was built-not then, later-for initially my attention was entirely captured by her hair and face. Thick, soft, silky, shimmering hair, too blond to be called auburn, too auburn to be blond, was combed across one side of her face, half obscuring one eye, reminding me of Veronica Lake, that movie star of an earlier era. If there was any fault at all in her exquisite face, it was that the very perfection of her features also gave her a slightly cool, distant, and unattainable look. Her eyes were large, blue, and limpid. The hot August sun streamed over her as if she were on a stage instead of perched on a battered wooden stool, and it didn't illuminate her the same way it did everyone else on the midway; the sun seemed to favor her, beaming upon her the way a father might look upon a favorite daughter, accenting the natural luster of her hair, proudly revealing the porcelain smoothness of her complexion, lovingly molding itself to her sculpted cheekbones and artfully chiseled nose, suggesting but not fully illuminating great depth and many mysteries in her entrancing eyes. I stood, dumbstruck, and watched her for a minute or two while she went through her spiel. She teased a mark out of the onlookers, took his fifty cents, sympathized with his inability to drive the wooden block above GOOD BOY, and smoothly enticed him into shelling out a buck for three more whacks at it. She broke all the rules for ballying an attraction: She never taunted the marks, not even a little; she hardly ever raised her voice to a shout, yet somehow her message carried above the music from the gypsy fortune-teller's tent, the competing spiel of the balloon game pitchman next door, and the ever-growing roar of the waking midway. Most unusual of all, she never got off the stool, did not attempt to draw the marks to her with an energetic display of pitchmanship, did not employ dramatic gestures, comic dance
steps, loud jokes, sexual innuendo, double entendres, or any of the standard techniques. Her patter was slyly amusing, and she was gorgeous; that was enough, and she was smart enough to know it was enough. She took my breath away. With a self-conscious shuffle that I sometimes had around pretty girls, I finally approached her, and she thought I was a mark who wanted to swing the hammer, but I said, "No, I'm looking for Miss Raines." "Why?" I "Jelly Jordan sent me." "You're Slim? I'm Rya Raines." "Oh," I said, startled, because she seemed like just a girl, hardly.older than me, not the kind of canny and aggressive concessionaire for whom I expected to be working. A faint frown reshaped her face slightly, but it did not detract from her beauty. "How old are you?" "Seventeen. "You look younger." "Going on eighteen," I said defensively. "That's the usual progression." "What?" "After that it'll be nineteen, then twenty, and then there'll be no stopping you," she said, a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice. Sensing that she was the type most likely to respond better to spunk than to subservience, I smiled and said, "I guess it wasn't like that with you. Looks to me like you jumped straight from twelve to ninety." She didn't smile back at me, and the coolness didn't go out of her, but she gave up the frown. "You can talk?" "Aren't I talking?" "You know what I mean." By way of an answer, I picked up the sledgehammer, swung it at the striking pad hard enough to ring the bell and attract the attention of the nearest marks, turned toward the concourse, and launched into a spiel. In a few minutes I brought in three bucks. "You'll do," Rya Raines said. When she talked to me, she stared straight into my eyes, and her gaze made me hotter than the August sun. "All you have to know is that the game isn't gaffed, which you've already proved, and I don't want you being an alibi agent. Gaffed games and alibi agents aren't allowed on the Sombra Brothers' lot, and I wouldn't have them even if they were allowed. It's not easy to ring that bell; pretty damned hard, in fact; but the mark gets a fair shot at winning, and when he does win, he gets the prize, no alibis." "I got you." Taking off her coin apron and change-maker and passing them to me, she spoke as firmly and briskly as any no-nonsense junior executive at General Motors: "I'll send someone around at five o'clock, and you'll be off from five till eight, for supper, for a nap if you need it, then you'll come back on and stay on until the midway closes down. You'll bring the receipts to me, at my trailer, tonight, down in the meadow. I have an Airstream, the largest they make. You'll recognize it because it's the only one hitched to a brand-new, red, one-ton Chevy pickup. If you play straight, if you don't do anything stupid like trying to skim the take, you'll do all right working for me. I own a few other concessions, and I'm always on the lookout for a right type who can handle responsibility. You get paid the end of every day, and if you're a good enough pitchman to improve on the average take, then you'll get a slice of the higher profits. If you're straight with me, you'll get a better deal from nobody. But-listen up now and be warned-if you jack me around,- buster, I'll see to it that you wind up with your balls in a sling. We understand each other?" "Yes. "Good." Remembering Jelly Jordan's reference to the girl who had started out as a weight-guesser and had worked her way up to a major concession by the age of seventeen, I said, "Uh, one of these other games you own-is it a duck shoot?" "Duck shoot, one guess-your-weight stand, one bottle-pitch, one grab-stand that specializes in pizza, a kiddy ride called the Happy Toonerville Trolley, and seventy percent interest in a sideshow called Animal Oddities," she said crisply. "And I'm neither twelve nor ninety; I'm twenty-one, and I've come a hell of a long way from nothing.in a hell of a short time. I didn't put it all together by being naive or soft or dumb. There's nothing of the mark in me, and as long as you remember that, Slim, we'll get along just fine." ' Without asking if I had any more questions, she walked off along the concourse. With each brisk stride she took, her small, firm, high ass worked prettily in her tight jeans. I watched her until she was out of sight in the growing crowd. Then, with a sudden realization of my condition, I put down the change-maker and the apron, turned to the high striker, picked up the sledgehammer, swung it seven times, one after the other, ringing the bell with six of the blows, not pausing until I could face the passing marks without the embarrassment of a very visible erection. As the afternoon wore on, I ballyed the high-striker with genuine pleasure. The trickle of marks grew to a stream and then to a river, flowing endlessly along the concourse in the warm summer glare, and I pulled in their shiny half-dollars almost as successfully as if I had been reaching into their pockets. Even when I saw the first goblin of the day, at a few minutes past two o'clock, my good mood and high enthusiasm stayed with me. I was accustomed to seeing seven or eight goblins a week, considerably more if I was working in an outfit that drew decent crowds or was traveling through a big city where there were lots of people. I had long ago figured that one out of every four or five hundred people is a goblin in disguise, which means perhaps half a million in the U.S. alone, so if I had not adjusted to seeing them everywhere I went, I would have gone mad before ever arriving at the Sombra Brothers Carnival. I knew by now that they were not aware of the special threat I posed to them; they did not realize that I could see through their masquerade, so they took no special interest in me. I had the itch to kill every one of them I saw, for I knew by experience that they were hostile to all mankind and had no purpose but to cause pain and misery on the earth. However, I seldom encountered them in lonely circumstances that permitted attack, and unless I wanted to learn what the inside of a prison was like, I did not dare slaughter one of the hateful creatures in full view of witnesses who could not perceive the devil under the human costume. The goblin that strolled by the high-striker shortly after two o'clock was comfortably ensconced in the body of a mark: a big, towheaded, open-faced, good-natured farm boy, eighteen or nineteen, dressed in a tank top, cutoff jeans, and sandals. He was with two other guys his age, neither of whom was a goblin, and he was just about the most innocent-looking citizen you ever saw, joking and cutting up a little, enjoying himself. But beneath the human glaze a goblin peered out with eyes of fire. The farm boy did not stop at the high-striker, and I kept my spiel unspooling as I watched him pass by, and not ten minutes later I saw a second beast. This one had assumed the appearance of a stocky, gray-haired man of about fifty-five, but his alien shape was grossly apparent to me. I know that what I see is not actually the physical goblin itself encased in some sort of plastic flesh. The human body is real enough. What I perceive is, I suppose, either the spirit of the goblin or the biological potential of its shape-shifting flesh. And, at a quarter of three, I saw two more of them. Outwardly they were just a pair of attractive teenage girls, small-town gawkers dazzled by the carnival. Within lurked monstrous entities with quivering pink snouts..By four o'clock, forty goblins had passed by the high striker, and a couple of them had even stopped to test their strength, and by that time my good mood had finally vanished. The crowd on the midway could not have numbered more than six or eight thousand, so the monsters among them far exceeded the usual ratio. Something was going on; something was meant to happen on the Sombra Brothers' midway this afternoon; this extraordinary convocation of goblins had one purpose-to witness human misery and suffering. As a species, they seemed not merely to enjoy our pain but to thrive on it, feed on it, as if our agony was their only-or primary-sustenance. I had seen them together in large groups only at scenes of tragedy: the funeral of four high school football players who had been killed in a bus accident back in my hometown a few years ago; a terrible automobile pile-up in Colorado; a fire in Chicago. Now, the more goblins I saw among the ordinary marks, the colder I became there in the August heat. By the time the explanation came to me, I was so on edge that I was seriously considering using the knife in my boot, slashing at least one or two of them, and running for my life. Then I realized what must have happened. They had come to see an accident at the Dodgem Car pavilion, expecting a rider to be maimed or killed. Yes. Of course. That was what the bastard had been up to last night, before I had confronted and killed him; he had been setting up an "accid
ent." Now that I thought about it, I was sure I knew what had been intended, for he had been tinkering with the power feed to the motor of one of the small cars. By killing him, I had unknowingly saved some poor mark from electrocution. Word had gone out on the goblin network: Death, pain, horrible mutilation, and mass hysteria at the carnival tomorrow! Don't miss this stupendous show! Bring the wife and kids! Blood and burning flesh! A show for the whole family! Responding to that message, they had come, but the promised feast of human misery had not been laid out for them, so they were wandering the concourses, trying to figure out what had happened, maybe even looking for the goblin I had murdered. From four o'clock until five, when the relief pitchman showed up, my spirits rose steadily, for I saw no more of my enemy. Off duty, I spent half an hour searching through the crowd, but the goblins all seemed to have gone away in disappointment. I returned to Sam Trizer's grab-stand for a bite of supper. After I had eaten, I felt much better, and I was even whistling when, on my way to the carnival headquarters to see about my trailer assignment, I encountered Jelly Jordan by the -carousel. "How goes it?" he asked, raising his voice above the calliope music. "Terrific." We moved beside the ticket booth, out of the swarming marks. He was eating a chocolate doughnut. He licked his lips and said, "Rya doesn't seem to've bitten off any of your ears or fingers." "She's nice," I said. He raised his eyebrows. "Well, she is," I said defensively. "A little gruff, maybe, and certainly plainspoken. But underneath all that, there's a decent lady, sensitive, worth knowing." "Oh, you're right. Absolutely. I ain't surprised by what you say-just that you saw through her hard-bitten act so quickly. Most people don't take time to see the niceness in her, and some people never see." My spirits rose further when I heard his confirmation of my vague psychic impressions. I wanted her to be nice. I wanted her to be a.good person under the Ice Maiden act. I wanted her to be a person worth knowing. Hell, what it came down to-I just wanted her, and I didn't want to be wanting someone who was genuinely a bitch. "Cash Dooley found trailer accommodations for you," Jelly said. "Better settle in while you're on your break." "I'll do that," I said. I was feeling great as I started to turn away from him, but then I saw something out of the corner of my eye that brought me crashing down. I swung back on him, praying that I had imagined what I thought I had seen, but it was not imagination; it was still there. Blood. There was blood all over Jelly Jordan's face. Not real blood, you understand. He was finishing his chocolate doughnut, unhurt, feeling no pain. What I saw was a clairvoyant vision, an omen of violence to come. Not merely violence, either. Superimposed on Jelly's living face was an image of his face in death, his eyes open and sightless, his chubby cheeks smeared with blood. He was not just swimming down the time-stream toward injury but . . . toward imminent death. He blinked at me. "What?" "Uh . . ." The precognitive flash faded. "Something wrong, Slim?" The vision was gone. There was no way I could tell him and make him believe. And even if I could make him believe, there was no way I could change the future. "Slim?" "No," I said. "Nothing wrong. I just . "Well?" "Wanted to thank you again." "You're too damned grateful, boy. I can't stand slobbering puppies." He scowled. "Now get the hell out of my sight." I hesitated. Then to cover my confusion and fear, I said, "Is that your Rya Raines imitation?" He blinked again and grinned at me. "Yeah. How was it?" "Not nearly mean enough." I left him laughing, and as I moved away I tried to persuade myself that my premonitions did not always come to pass (although they did) -and that, even if he was going to die, it wouldn't be soon (although I sensed it would be very soon, indeed) -and that even if it would be soon, there was surely something I could do to prevent it. Something. Surely something.
Dean Koontz - (1985) Page 3